Ok, I'll jump. How *do* I get involved? I'm currently jumping around with various ideas in my head, mostly all for personal fulfillment, and working on something more important to the community *is* what I am looking for. My previous involvement in open source projects is minimal, I've attempted to start something on sourceforge before, but nothing really came of it -- mainly because a lot of cool things can't happen while flying solo.

Perl6 is very important to Perl, of course, mainly because it straightens out the OO model enough to where it can start to really gain widespread acceptance in places Perl can't normally go. It's the third-stage rocket booster to Perl greatness, essentially.

Let me know what I can do, and I'm there. I have some fairly sharp design and development skills (IMHO), experience across a wide set of languages -- yet I'm not exactly sure how the process works. Helping would be awesome though.

Well, just don't tell anyone the third stage is a nuclear fission rocket, eh?
(We're also working a fusion drive for Perl 7, but that's always going to be 20 years away...)

As for helping out, most folks just lurk on perl6-language and perl6-internals for a while until they get up to speed. There are various documents on dev.perl.org, but you have to read them as works in progress, especially the mailing list archives.

Ok, useful stuff. I read over http://www.parrotcode.org/todo
and the stories page, but it still leaves me a little confused as to how I can dive in, etc.

How does the development process work? How does one sign-up for work items? Or is it a "look I implemented this first" kind of thing? I understand the patch system, all that seems to make sense...the question is, who determines who does what, or what is a good idea or what should actually be included?

Definitely I need to lurk a while and understand what is going on -- I just don't want to lurk forever and never figure the process out though, as it appears this may be the case.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other